25 | Poetry & Art by Carla Stein
Cauldera
The ones who spoke with first-born oaks
cherished yarrow gathered goldenrod
brewed camomile lemon balm
Tatik bedtime-stories
mix screams and ash with skin and fat
smoulder on sandalwood pyres
an incense faint with roses and wrinkles
adrift upon unwritten nightmares
eons spill brujas martyred maimed
atoms quicken oak leaves to
immortal embers
their kin in primeval bellies
gush pyroclastics
bubble igneous blood
give form to obsidian lineages
granite lives
hewn, harrowed in ignorance mix in the hard sweat of a fevered planet
Etna, Erebus, Sakurajima recite burnt-bone parables
Merapi hisses deeply amniotic fluid boils rises in suffocating paeans
Kīlauea leaches roses and wrinkles
fractures geography
rebuilds the world
Aeaea
Beauty acknowledged you
made immortal promises
love sustained, sheltered, only by Beauty —
her solitary alabaster arms wrapped
you in honey-ed air
unbound a sexless silken veil
as you fed on her island illusions
Beauty’s warmth and Beauty’s smile —
her fruits ripening forever
the table piled with pledges while
Beauty spoke her truth
made you a lie
gave you a world and
took your freedom
Sunflowers
all winter I watched
them wither,
heads bowing deeper
with each snowfall
they grew more quickly than
the corn we planted —
lacked proportion, a
parody of our emotions
today their frost-burned tops
rattle in a spring-scented wind
in my hand fresh seed packets
foretell a crop of daydreams
in a summer cornfield
Carla Stein
Carla Stein’s illustrations appear in chapbooks, on walls and on-line including The Belladonna, Stonecoast Review, Friday’s Poems, Island Arts Magazine, Lemonspouting and others. She’s in the garden when not making art or writing and illustrating her own poetry. Click on the artist link to find more of Carla’s work.